Paradiso (Amsterdam)

Here is one of those slightly conflicting stories and when we can track down Adri Hazevoet we can settle it.

Sadly the only other person who can validate the story is Max Terveen who we used to chat to 20+ years ago but sadly he is no longer with us.

The 'conflict' is that Max always said he did the lights at the Paradiso from the very start, but so does Adri Hazevoet (sort of)....can you help?

Borrowed from https://geheugenvancentrum.amsterdam/en/page/1819/de-paradiso-lichtshow:

Between 1970 and 1975, Adri Hazevoet and his staff created a moving wall of light images every evening from the first balcony of Paradiso. Behind the stage, surrealist collages appeared, such as a monkey and a gecko in the Central Station. Curator Annemarie de Wildt recorded Hazevoet's memories.

Adri, who often spells his name as A3, combined icons from pop culture with images he found in magazines. He projected liquid slides and light from overhead projectors (via a bicycle wheel with color filters and a motor-driven bicycle wheel) over these found images, his own photos and images reproduced on slides .

Behind the stage was a screen spanning the entire width and height of the hall , but the musicians themselves were also bathed in the kaleidoscopic flood of images. Hazevoet: “The hall became bigger and more colorful.” The balcony was not yet accessible to the public at the time.

Nowadays, a VJ makes images with a Mac, which are projected by a beamer. Adri used a large part of the balcony. There were approximately 20 slide projectors, 3 film projectors, 5 projectors for liquid slides, 3 overhead projectors and the boxes with slides. Adri: “I had the best equipment that was common, available and affordable at the time.”

Setlist

Before the hall opened, the equipment was set up from 7 to 8 o'clock. "If you were lucky, you got a set list from the band. But that could still change completely. Some bands had ideas about the projections, but usually we came up with it ourselves".

At 8 o'clock the hall opened and then there was an opening image, which could remain for half an hour, sometimes with 16 mm films of Mickey Mouse or other cartoons projected through it .

During the entire concert, Adri and his two assistants were busy 'building images' live, as they called it. No second was the same. The slides were ready in about 50 slide magazines, each with 50 slides. Spinning slides , intended for projectors that made rotating images, were conveniently in a separate box.

Adri made many of the images himself: collages with scissors and glue stick, which he then photographed on slide film . " We sometimes played on current events, with a photo of Nixon, for example. And also on the artist himself. For the performance of the Zangeres zonder Naam, I, together with Gert Jan Dröge and Rik van Bentum, searched for sweet postcards on the Waterlooplein.”

Hazevoet lived near Paradiso. Every week he took the stock of slides home, to add new ones and (temporarily) remove old ones. In total he made thousands of slides.

Career break

“During the 1960s I had a good job in TV technology. I could afford good cameras and took a lot of photos, including the demolition of Amsterdam in black and white, later on color slides.” Becoming a sound and light technician at Paradiso was a drastic career change, but Adri thought it would be much more fun. He was welcomed with open arms and was the first to take care of a proper sound system.

“I soon got involved in presenting the programs and did the light show . The people around me naturally considered me an artist. A technical (electronics) background was very useful to be able to execute all those artistic ideas.” In the first years of Paradiso, the Light Show was done by a group of Englishmen .

Amoeba-like patterns

Adri did the Light Show in a changing composition with Jolanthe, Marianne, Liene and Oscar , 4 or 5 evenings a week. Jolanthe or one of the other employees operated the liquid slides with a projection device in which a thin glass disk with a layer of paint and oil rotated with the effect of an amoeba-like pattern of colours. “It was quite dirty work and they caused a stir when they went to the bar to get a beer all smeared with paint.

Everything was much more unregulated than it is now, there was no Arbo legislation.”

1970

1970

1970